history

The Second Temporary Art Strike Action Committee – Alytus Chapter (STASAC-Alytus) has called for an Art strike action against Vilnius becoming European Cultural Capital for 2009, calling for Sympathy Strikes all over the world to support The Strike activities in Lithuania during the whole year 2009.

Just as the art strike Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between 1990 and 1993 – was, unlike the art strikes proposed by Gustav Metzger and the Art Worker Coalition in the 1960s, not merely a boycott of art institutions through artists, but a provocation of artists addressing their understanding of art and their identity as artists.In these previous strikes there has been a critical position against Art as a specifically bourgeois construction, and an adoption of the position of ‘Cultural workers’.

As the art strike is not centered on a job or region or trade – it is not a matter for a Job union, a Trade Union but an Industrial Union – that of culture as an industry. However in order to attack the Bogdanovist position where proletarian culture or proletkult is the third part of a trinity of revolutionary socialism, Whereas the unions would attend to the proletariat’s economic interests and the Communist Party, their political interests, the Proletkult would look after their cultural and spiritual life – we should look to the integration of all of these activities into our daily life and under the direct control of the workers at large.

This is one of the aims of the proposed Data Miners Strike called for by the Situationist Worker in The End of the Age of Divinity – a process to lead up to a General Strike in 2012. But instead of organizing as Data Miners, a position based on the idea of miners as proletarian vanguard, it is the real organizational structure of the IWW through which the proletariat can communicate – which includes the organization of miners as one of the first Industrial Unions (200 – after Agricultural workers 100). The IWW’S numerical system of organizing industrial unions is more than a means of communication – it is a memory system and an ordering of semantic space – an ontology and topology. It is the situation of proletarization opposed to bourgeois freemasonic systems such as the Semantic Web and the Dewey Decimal System.

The IWW structure currently goes from 100-600 and is formed with the organization of workers around the world. Its future development is open and it could become a hexadecimal system. However, while the data miners would be organized in Communications and Computer Workers Industrial Union 560 there is currently no IU for artists or indeed those cultural workers who are refusing this role – other than Recreational Workers Industrial Union 630.

I am therefore proposing that instead of concentrating on the different material or media produced – we look at the psychic construction and production that we are involved in. The IWW structure currently goes from 100 to 600 and we therefore can theorize 000 and 700 as its limits. In proposing 700/007 we are also putting Proletarian organization as the ultimate critique of John Dee’s systematic Enochian system of Hermetic Magic.

In organizing as psychic workers we can identify the industries in which psychic workers currently are mainly employed as entertainment and the military. Psychic warfare is already one of the major areas of the military industry’s recent growth and also demonstrated how cultural production and propaganda are areas where we must create workers power and control. This points to another current omission in the organization of the IWW – that of military workers – in the army, navy or airforce – or indeed in the production and distribution of arms. The question of proletarian armed struggle which is of course inevitable and vital rest upon this organization.

I hope that the move towards the organizing of psychic workers is a step towards realizing this.